This application is a Continuation-in-Part of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/925,884, filed Aug. 6, 2001 ; which is a Continuation-in-Part of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/621,028, filed Jul. 21, 2000, and now U.S. Pat. No. 6,869,487; which:                A.] is a Continuation-in-Part of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/853,649, filed May 9, 1997, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,240,933;        B.] is a Continuation-in-Part of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/061,318, filed Apr. 16, 1998, now abandoned,        C.] is a Continuation-in-Part of International Application No. PCT/US99/08516, filed Apr. 16, 1999, claiming priority to U.S. Provisional Patent Application Ser. No. 60/099,067, filed Sep. 3, 1998 and 60/125,304, filed Mar. 19, 1999; and        D.] claims priority to U.S. Provisional Patent Application Ser. No. 60/145,350, filed Jul. 23, 1999.        This Application also claims priority to U.S. Provisional Patent Application Ser. No. 60/486,771, filed Jul. 10, 2003. Priority to each of these applications is claimed. The applications listed above are incorporated herein by reference.        
Semiconductor devices are widely used in almost all consumer and home electronic products, as well as in communications, medical, industrial, military, and office products and equipment. Microelectronic semiconductor devices are manufactured from semiconductor wafers. The features forming these devices are often just fractions of a micron. This makes these microelectronic devices highly susceptible to performance degradation or even complete failure due to contamination by organic or metal particles. Consequently, cleaning the wafers, to remove contamination, is often a critical step in the manufacturing process.
For many years, wafers were cleaned in typically three or four separate steps using strong acids, such as sulfuric acid, and using strong caustic solutions, such as mixtures of hydrogen peroxide or ammonium hydroxide. Organic solvents have also been used with wafers having metal films. While these methods performed well, they had certain disadvantages, including the high cost of the process chemicals, the relatively long time required to get wafers through the various cleaning steps, high consumption of water due to the need for extensive rinsing between chemical steps, and high disposal costs. As a result, extensive research and development efforts focused on finding better wafer cleaning techniques.
More recently, the semiconductor manufacturing industry began to acknowledge a revolutionary new process for cleaning wafers, using ozone diffused through a thin layer of heated water on the wafers. This ozone diffusion process has proven itself to be highly effective in cleaning contamination and organic films off of wafers, while avoiding many of the disadvantages of the older methods using acids and caustics. The advantages of the ozone diffusion process are that is it fast, requires no expensive and toxic liquid acids or caustics, and operates effectively as a spray process, which greatly reduces water consumption and space requirements.
The ozone diffusion cleaning technique can be performed in various ways. These include spraying water onto the workpiece while injecting ozone into the water, spraying water on the workpiece while delivering ozone to the workpiece, delivering a combination of steam or water vapor and ozone to the workpiece, and applying water, ozone, and sonic energy simultaneously to the workpiece. Spray techniques using water at elevated temperatures have been especially successful at increasing the removal rates of various organic films and contaminants from workpiece surfaces.